Sunday, January 18, 2009



I got to like the big-hipped cat-faced women of the photographs shown as lures out in the front of the Fourteenth Street burlesque show; the announcements of moving picture palaces bejeweled with plastic-bright lights; the little music shops that sold big brass-band instruments and Slavic and Balkan records and had radios tht blared into the street; the Field's restaurant window with the white-aproned girl, blue-livid under a mercury tube, making pancakes on a hot metal slab; the young women of the pavements, some of them pretty, Italian or Jewish or whatever, stopping to look in at the displays in the windows of the dress and the shoe shops.
The Princess with the Golden Hair - Memoirs of Hecate County - Edmund Wilson



It was sometime in 1981 that I was approached by the very lovely but also very politically active Anne Gordon. She had helped organize the Vancouver strippers into an organization called VEDA (Vancouver Exotic Dancers Association).They organized stripathons for charity. What Gordon wanted from me was a series of risque postcards that were going to be sold at something called The Best Of Burlesque 1981 that was going to be held at the Marr Hotel on Powell Street.



I took 9 different situations and I am posting 7 of them here as the other two would be completely defaced of any value if I were to hide "stuff." By today's standards these postcards are tame indeed but perhaps some of you might discern just a bit of charm.